R.I.P Opera, is Firefox offering a cure? [Welcome, Vivaldi!]

[Filehero]

Yes!

But before it's crunch-time, some words of blue:

I've been a long time Opera user, I had even paid for it when it wasn't free (the oldest installer I find in my local backups is ow32dede511.exe from 26.06.2001, 2.277 KB!). I always enjoyed the "other" approach to web surfing offered by those Norsemen. They really had a strong impact on the general route of web browser development.

AFAIK, they were the first to introduce tabbed browsing (though they didn't invent tabs, of course) and mouse gestures. And they were the first to establish a - still unmatched - granular site-specific configuration for privacy and security related settings. For the record, Opera most of the time was amongst the fastest browsers - for whatever that means for everyday usage.
Over time it became more and more obvious, this alternative approach had a price-tag in terms of development and maintenance of rather complex render engines. There were always problems with some major sites, often caused by "optimizations" for the big player browsers. This pitfall got dramatically boosted in the recent years leading to situations were the people had been forced to use a different browser to surf specific sites comfortably. Some say 11.64 was the last "good" release, and the current 12.15 of the "Presto" branch was doomed from the very beginning. The web says Google+, Facebook and their likes were reported to be unsurfable. Can't confirm that, but experienced problems with many other "modern" sites as well.
Nevertheless, I was confident they will overcome the major problems with the next version as they always did.

My first disbelief arose as they announced to change from Presto to Webkit (http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/300-milli ... -to-webkit). But even after they updated their plans to make Blink/Chromium they new browser core (http://www.favbrowser.com/opera-changes ... of-webkit/) I was confident, they would just change the core leaving all the wonderful added-on features alive - until they released the first version completely revamped from scratch (http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/20 ... ilable-now).
Just some weeks later it seems clear, they really left the past behind to join the club of Me too browsers powered by Google. No customization, NO BOOKMARKS!, instead spam covered as modern information feeding ...

SAD - but hope remains!


So, I now have taken the plunge and tried to switch to Firefox. After a couple of days I think it works.

The wonderful past

Opera_12.15.png (125.17 KiB) Viewed 24871 times

There is new hope

FF_22.png (144.21 KiB) Viewed 24871 times

How to (note, my translations are freestyle from the German GUI):
- get and install Firefox 21 or 22 (I use the portableapps.com release)
- (1) install Add-on TabMix Plus. It offers heaps of settings, the most important ones are "display tabs below content" and "On click switch to last active tab".
- (2) Move address and search bars and standard buttons all the way down in "customize appearance" mode.
- (3) install Add-on Extended Statusbar, set it to classic style and hide what you don't wanna see.
- (4) install Add-on NoScript. It replaces Opera's general and per-page JS settings and MUCH MORE.
- (5) install Add-on CookieController. It replaces Opera's general and per-page cookie settings and MUCH MORE.
- (6) install Add-on Ghostery.
- (7) install Add-on InFormEnter. It replaces Opera's form defaults (but still lacking auto-completion).
- (8) install Add-on Tab Group Switcher. It's not Opera's tab stacking, but offers sort of tabsets (unfortunately doesn't remember the last active tab on switch).

And under the hood:
- install Add-on Add to Search Bar.
- install Add-on All-in-One Sidebar. Opera's F4, 'nuff said.
- install Add-on Customizable Shortcuts. Does not support shortcuts for tab cyling/left/right yet.
- install Add-on DownThemAll!. One of those download managers.
- install Add-on FireGestures!. Surprisingly more responsive than Opera.
- install Add-on Thumbnail Zoom Plus!. Yet, no match for Imagus...


Cheers,
Filehero

/e (06.02.2105): pointer to Vivaldi appended to title

[FluxTorpedoe]

.
R.I.P. Opera
.
Just my thought unfortunately.

some words of blue

Gladly paid for it back in the days, and tweaked it to use it portable.
As a wanderer it was my only unified computerized "home" I carried on a flashdrive, with web+bookmarks, emails+contacts, & notes. And fully customized to my needs.
No we're just left with an impotent soft marred with regressions. Nothing terrible ofc, it's just software.
But it's really sad when great-ideas-turned-into-great-products slip into becoming lifeless products without ideas - and soon without customers.

---

Now to the pertinent question: What can we use?
Last/each time I tried Firefox, it was really slow (on low-end hardware). But the diversity of extensions always made it interesting...
I'll try it once again with your suggestions, thanks for sharing!

I'll have to consider finding another email client too. No reason to continue using the once-great now-forgotten M2 anymore. Especially since it's not integrated.

What a pity.
So much software-time I'd rather spend making XY scripts...

[Marco]

Last/each time I tried Firefox, it was really slow (on low-end hardware). But the diversity of extensions always made it interesting...
I'll try it once again with your suggestions, thanks for sharing!

I'll have to consider finding another email client too. No reason to continue using the once-great now-forgotten M2 anymore. Especially since it's not integrated.

My choice is Firefox, as of now. I can't properly speak in terms of speed, however here's my scenario. Laptop with i5-480M connected to a 1920*1200 monitor, scrolling this page, http://forum.voidtools.com/viewforum.ph ... 78a1f360c8 (from the forum of Everything, the search engine). Opera is smoother. But honestly, the ability to remove ads with adblock plus and using some other pretty useful extensions (TextArea Cache, for example, that saves locally what I'm typing right now so that in case of power outage I don't lose a single word) outweights the (apparent) lack of speed.

And re the email client, I'd try Thunderbird.

[FluxTorpedoe]

Thanks for the tips. TextArea Cache sounds valuable indeed!
For the rest, adblock in Opera was terrific too, but seems there's also even more User JS possibilities in Firefox. Don't know about User CSS and overall UI personal customizability...

As for the email client, yep, Thunderbird seems a major contender if there's still active development (to avoid the same path as Opera...).

[Marco]

Thunderbird is actively maintained in the sense that bugfixes are provided. However addition of new features is offloaded to the community... whatever that means (intro from wikipedia).
But honestly, it seems to me that the web browser experience is changing, requiring constant development. OTOH, emails are pretty much the same they were ten years ago. So the lack of addition of new features is a non-issue imo.

[Regmos]

You might like these to. Makes life with Firefox a bit easier.

Personal menu

Extensions options menu

And THIS to share your results.

[Filehero]

Thanks for the links to the menu extensions.

As for speed: after some days I really think FF 21/21 seems to be '"snappier" then Opera 21.15. At least my main standard pages appear to be refreshed quicker upon F5.


Cheers,
Filehero

[Jerry]

I've been using Firefox from near inception since switching from old Netscape and Mosaic before that. (I keep Internet Explorer completely locked down with Norton.) I have a toolkit of exceptional Firefox Add-ons/Extensions that I use, with varying frequency, and it's fair say I use Firefox mostly for those tools and of course, the flexible environment. I have tried Chrome, which would never serve as my primary browser, but continue to use for restricted purposes, like running Java applications, visiting web sites without any NoScript (a Firefox Add-On) restrictions, etc.

I respect the accomplishments of the Opera folks. Firefox was no doubt improved by their efforts in the early days. I first learned about mouse gestures from Opera. But long-term viability is important for the tools in my toolkit, and I never quite saw Opera as fitting the bill. Though, I must say, that I'm no longer sure what the deal is with Mozilla, these days, given their apparent stance with Thunderbird as well as their crazy, problem-ridden release cycle. I am still using Eudora 7.0.1.0 (with complete email continuity and instant searchability going back 18 years) and know that time is past due to switch away. I was thinking about Thunderbird as at least a first step because the platform is used by offshoots like Postbox.

[highend]

I have a toolkit of exceptional Firefox Add-ons/Extensions that I use

Do you like to share that list?

[Filehero]

Opera 15 released.

Bold move. What was announced as "mordernizing the core/render engine" ended up in removal of every single functional piece that made Opera unique and different.

Well, there's some hope for Opera 20....


Cheers,
Filehero

[Regmos]

Do you like to share that list?

For easy sharing

https://addons.mozilla.org/da/firefox/a ... st-dumper/

[Jerry]

Do you like to share that list?

For easy sharing: https://addons.mozilla.org/da/firefox/a ... st-dumper/

Sure. I'd attach a report generated by my InfoLister add-on (similar to Regmos's Extension List Dumper), but at the moment it's cluttered with disabled entries and some author sites are bad. I also thought it would be more useful to group and list them with some annotation and links below.
BTW: Don't use Firefox 22 at this time. They screwed up the default zoom and rendering. In general, don't auto-update Firefox. Better to wait until problems shake out. I was using 3.6.x for the longest time until finally switching to version 12.

Staple Utilities (use every day)
Adblock Plus 2.2.4
NoScript 2.6.6.6 [Block page access to scripting and external sites, manually enable only as needed]
Flashblock 1.5.17 [Don't run flash animations until special button is pressed]
Tab Mix Plus 0.4.1.0 [Tab sessions, tab manipulation - lock,merge,auto-reload with timer, etc.]
ColorfulTabs 19.1 [color tabs by site & other ways and remember]
Linky 3.0.0 [copy,open,download,validate all or selected links or text that is a link]
Link Gopher 1.3.2 [show all links in a page, optionally selected by filter]
All-in-One Gestures 0.26 [Mouse gestures for Firefox]
Image Zoom 0.6.3 [Rotate and zoom individually selected images in page.]
DownloadHelper 4.9.15 [Download youtube and other streaming videos to files.]

Navigation
Go Parent Folder 2.7 [Go to the selected bookmark's parent bookmark folder, when it appears in a flat listing, like after a search]
Go to Selection 1.3.1 [Go directly to selected text as a link]
Neo Diggler 1.0.6 [Adds button menu next to address bar letting you navigate up the URL hierarchy, ftp, etc.]
Tile Tabs 9.2 [Lets you tile your tabs in one window to your heart's delight. Good for dual-page work.]

Selection, copy
Extended Copy Menu 1.6.1 [Lets you to copy selected text as plain text or html].
Table2Clipboard 1.5.3.1 [Specify formatting for copying cells,rows from tables - handy when pasting into Excel and elsewhere]
TableTools2 1.17 [Comprehensive utility for doing all kinds of things with table data - sort and multisort, charting, filtering, etc.]

Bookmarks
Edit Bookmark Plus 2.3.0 [Additional bookmark editing functions]

Web Page Customization & Tools
Color That Site! 0.15 [Change and remember custom colors for web sites, pages, etc. when they hard to see well]
Nuke Anything Enhanced 1.0.2 [Get rid of extraneous, distracting stuff on the page -- useful when printing]
Web Developer 1.2.5 [Poweruser web page inspection, manipulation -- some very handy functions in here]
View Dependencies 0.3.3.2 [Adds a tab in Page Info to see all other resources used by a page]
RightToClick 2.9.4 [Tries to stop pages from preventing right-clicking and other things.]
Stop Autoplay 1.2.1 [Stop pages from auto-running stuff. This utility seems to be no longer supported, but still works I think.]
JSView 2.0.8 [View page's scripts and style sheets]
Cookie Exporter 1.5 [Exports cookies to text file. I use this with Gnu wget when I need the cookies to fetch url content by command-line.]

System Utilities
HttpFox 0.8.12 [Trace all the HTTP connections Firefox is making, see content, query, post data, cookies, etc]

Other Good Miscellaneous Stuff
iMacros for Firefox 8.3.0 [Record macros. Save and play them back.]
Highlighter 0.1.6 [Lets you highlight stuff on a page. Handy when reading/searching through a large amount of content.]

Obsolete or No longer Supported Utilities That Need to Come Back
Load Tabs Progressively 1.6.1 [Lets you throttle the number of tabs that get loaded at any one time. No longer working.]

Jerry

[neminem]

Seems strange that you included Web Developer, but not Firebug? Having recently switched to a team at work that's sometimes responsible for web development, I've learned to love both of those (Web Developer is particularly essential for its "View Generated Source - Firebug only shows you the state of the source as it was first downloaded. Firebug, though, is essential for having a good javascript debugger, and in my opinion, a much much useful on-the-fly css editor.)

Also seems strange that you included a bunch of specific page-modifying addons, but didn't include the granddaddy of all page modifying addons, Greasemonkey. (Basically a meta-addon: you install Greasemonkey, then you can install Greasemonkey scripts, which are written in a modified version of javascript and which can mess around with specified pages to do basically anything you can do in Javascript, and a few things you can't.)

Of course, given that Firefox has gone absolutely crazy messing up their UI this past year, I also can't live without a couple of UI-sanity-restoring addons, most notably, Status-4-Evar, which adds the status bar back to the right place, but also more recently, "Hide Tab Bar With One Tab", which does exactly what it says.

Also, Download Statusbar, which gives you a compact way to see recent downloads without opening any new windows.

Weird though - I've been on the beta cycle for a while, and while they do every so often break important UI components (and insist that it's better the new way, cause they're crazy, making me download addons to restore basic functionality)... I've never noticed anything broken regarding "default zoom" or "rendering"?

(I also refuse to give up my Firefox 2 theme, as I think FF2 looked the best. I will admit to being silly on that one, though, and if it finally stopped working completely, I would probably survive.)

[Jerry]

Hi neminem. My list was never intended to be comprehensive or selective of the best. It's just the add-ons which I have found to be consistently sufficient for my needs as well as not being too complex or over-reaching in feature, or a potential security risk (I hope).

I use Web Developer and the other page tools for basic inspection and diagnosis of things when I need it. I don't do web development work (anymore), but I know all about it to use the tools.

Now Greasemonkey, well - I know of it and I really don't want to be running it, for potential security reasons and because I don't want to mess with scripts if I can otherwise avoid it. For web browsing, I prefer to do minimum technical configuration and maintenance.

I just installed Download Statusbar. Looks good. Thanks.

Back to Firefox and Mozilla, it was stuff like the absence of the regular status bar and revised tab placement, etc, in addition to having to deal with add-on compatibility and replacement issues that kept me fixed at 3.6.x for a long time, and wisely so, I must say. But sure enough, just when I thought all seemed to be going ok I rushed into the 22 release. I am NOT on the beta cycle and don't want to be. Anyway, with Firefox 22, the zoom of pages and also the rendering of window controls has been screwed up, at least for some people, like me. Google "Firefox 22 zoom" and you'll see some of the emerging discussion. I went back to Firefox 21b7.

Jerry

[neminem]

Ah, that makes sense, was a bug with non-default system dpi settings. Makes sense I didn't run into it, since I don't use any computers that aren't using the default for that setting. Still weird they didn't catch it in beta though; that's exactly what a public beta is supposed to be for.

And that's fine not being comprehensive, I'm sure there are tons of excellent addons neither of us mentioned, still. I just figured I'd add a few to your list that I find necessary (meanwhile, I hadn't heard of a lot of your addons, and a couple of those actually look pretty useful.)

So, that certainly is one thing that I love about Firefox, its extensibility (especially now that I've finally gotten it to stop bugging me every 6 weeks that all my addons are invalid just because their developers didn't update the number... ironically, with the help of yet another addon. Yes, there are a lot of things I love about Firefox, but there are also a lot of decisions they've made that I find extremely dumb. But you can fix them all with addons, yay! )

(Though at least, at this point I personally don't have any open annoyances with Firefox that I haven't fixed with some sort of customization or addon, which is more than I can say about a lot of programs. I do still keep a copy of 3.x around, but that's only because I rely heavily on greasemonkey scripts for one particular web game, and a number of those scripts haven't been maintained in years and don't work properly post-3.x.)